The Reign of Terror

The Emperor,” said Quintus Cestius, “dined last night on fish and mushrooms sprinkled with powdered pearls, on lentils with onyx, on turnips with amber. He has the stomach of an ox and the mind of a madman.”

“Ah, do you think he’s mad, then?” Sulpicius Silanus asked. A mischievous twinkle came into his eyes. “I don’t. I think he’s merely playful.”

“Playful,” Cestius said somberly. “Yes. Feeds his dogs on goose liver. Sleeps on couches of solid silver, with mattresses stuffed with rabbit fur or partridge feathers. Covers his furniture with cloth of gold. Yes, very playful indeed.”

“Has buckets of saffron dumped into the palace swimming pool before he’ll dip a toe in,” Silanus said.

“Cooking-pots of silver.”

“Wine flavored with poppy juice.”

“All his food tinted blue one night, green the next, scarlet the night after that.”

“Drove a chariot pulled by four elephants down the concourse in front of the Vatican Palace.”

“And one drawn by four camels, the week before. It’ll be dogs next week, I suppose, and lions the week after that.”

“A madman,” said Cestius.

“Merely very playful,” Silanus said. And they both laughed, though each of them knew only too well that the Emperor Demetrius II’s mounting extravagance was not any laughing matter; for Cestius was the Prefect of the Fiscus Imperialis, the Emperor’s private purse, and Silanus, his counterpart on the other side of the Roman treasury, was Prefect of the Fiscus Publicus, out of which all governmental expenditures came. In some reigns, those two great pots of money had been kept rigidly segregated. In others, the Emperors had been not unwilling to dip into their private funds to pay for such popular things as the rebuilding of aqueducts and bridges, the underwriting of gladiatorial games, and the construction of grand new public buildings. But the Emperor Demetrius had never seemed to see any distinction at all between Fiscus Imperialis and Fiscus Publicus. He spent as he pleased, and left it up to Silanus and Cestius to find the money in one department of the treasury or the other. And in the last few years the problem had been growing steadily worse.

It was the first day of the new month, when the two treasurers customarily lunched together in the dining room that was provided for high governmental officials in the Senatorial office building just in back of the Senate House. They made a curious couple: the perpetually gloomy Quintus Cestius was round as a barrel, a big, fleshy-cheeked man of florid complexion, and the ever-exuberant Sulpicius Silanus was small and lean and spare, a taut little hatchet of a man who could easily have been tucked in a stray fold of Cestius’s vast toga. The lunches that they favored were always the same, a plate of raw vegetables and apples for Cestius, and a gluttonous procession of soups, porridges, stewed meats, and aromatic cheeses soaked in honey for little Silanus. Cestius, plump from childhood though he had never had much of a fondness for food, often wondered where Silanus managed to store all that he was capable of consuming at a single sitting.

As he worked on a great haunch of boar Silanus said, without looking up, “I have had a letter from my brother in Hispania. He tells me the Count Valerian Apollinaris has finished the reconquest there and will be returning to the capital soon.”

“Wonderful,” said Cestius darkly. “A great triumphal feast will be in order, then. A million and a half sesterces scattered at a single throw to pay for it: flamingo brains, mullets baked on a bed of hyacinths shipped up from Sicilia, venison of the giant stag of the far northlands, wines a hundred years old, and all the rest. All of it wasted on Apollinaris, who will disapprove of the expense, and who will sit there stiff as one of those stone gods from Aegyptus, merely nibbling at this dish and that one. But I’ll have to find the money for it all the same. Or you will, I suppose.”

“My brother says,” Silanus continued, as though Cestius had not spoken at all, “that the thrifty Count Valerian Apollinaris is deeply disturbed by the shortfall in military funds that made his work of reconquest so much more complicated than it needed to be, and intends to speak vigorously with His Majesty concerning a tighter domestic budget.”

“The Count would be well advised not to try.”

“Would anyone, even the Emperor, dare to lay a finger on the Count Valerian Apollinaris, the hero of the War of Reunification?”

“I don’t mean that he’d be in any danger,” said Cestius. “Only that the Emperor will pay no attention. Just the other day the equally thrifty Larcius Torquatus took the very same matter up with the Emperor at the palace. I wasn’t there, but I heard. If anything, Torquatus has become more ferocious on the subject of the Emperor’s wastefulness than Apollinaris ever was, now that he’s part of the government himself. So there they were, the Consul and the Emperor, the Consul ranting and shouting, the Emperor laughing and laughing.”

“And he would laugh at us as well. You and I are the only two officials in the entire government who care at all about his level of expenditures. Other than Apollinaris and Torquatus, of course.”

“Yes. All the rest are fools or weaklings, or else just as mad as the Emperor himself.”

“And you and I are the ones who have to find the funds to pay the bills, somehow. We are the ones who bear the burden of the Emperor’s lunacy,” said Silanus.

“Indeed.”

“And has the Emperor dismissed Torquatus, then, for shouting at him?”

“Oh, no, not at all. As ever, the Emperor is untroubled about such things. After Torquatus left the palace, I’m told, Demetrius sent him a little gift as a peace offering: the beautiful harlot Eumenia, stark naked and covered all over with gold dust, sitting in a jeweled carriage drawn by the black horses of Arabia that cost a hundred thousand sesterces apiece. They say that Torquatus nearly had a stroke when he saw it arrive.”

“Well, then,” said Silanus, “you’d better start putting money aside for a present for Apollinaris.”

The Count Valerian Apollinaris, just then, was hundreds of miles away in the great Hispanian city of Tarraco, the final stopping point on his whirlwind military tour of the Empire’s rebellious western provinces. One by one he had subjugated them with a minimal expenditure of force and bloodshed: first Sicilia, where all the trouble had begun back in 2563, then Belgica and Gallia, and finally Hispania. His technique had been the same in each place, arriving with a small hand-picked army of tough, grim legionaries, demanding of the local governors an immediate renewal of the oath of allegiance to the Emperor, and then the swift seizure and public execution of eight or ten insurrectionist leaders as an example to the others. The idea was to remind the provincials that Roma was still Roma, that the Imperial army was as efficient and ruthless now as it had been in the days of Trajan and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius seventeen centuries before, and that he, Count Valerian Apollinaris, was the living embodiment of all the ancient Roman virtues that had made the Empire the immortal globe-spanning entity that it was.

And it had worked. In a series of quick, bloody strokes, Apollinaris had put an end—for all time, he hoped—to the slow, steady process of crumbling that had afflicted the Empire for nearly a century, during this era of foolishness and wanton waste that was beginning to be known as the Second Decadence.

Now, coming to the end of his fourth term of office as Consul, he was ready to return to Roma and enter into private life once more. Power for its own sake had never interested him, nor great wealth, or enormous luxury. Wealth was something he had been born to, and he took it for granted; power had accrued to him almost by default from his early manhood on, and because he had never hungered for it he never abused it; and as for enormous luxury, he left that to those who craved it, such as that hapless idiot, the Emperor Demetrius II.

Demetrius, of course, was an unending problem. The craziest Emperor of a largely crazy dynasty, he had held the throne for more than twenty years of ever-increasing madness, and it was small wonder that the Empire seemed to be spinning centrifugally apart. Only the devoted work, behind the scenes, of a small group of staunchly disciplined men like Apollinaris and his Consular counterpart back in Roma, Marcus Larcius Torquatus, had kept the regime from collapsing entirely.

There had been difficulties in the outlying provinces for nearly a century. Some of that was inherent in the Imperial system: the Empire was really too big to be governed from a central authority. That much had been understood from earliest Imperial times, which was why no serious attempt had ever been made to bring such far-off places as India and the lands that lay beyond it under direct Roman administration. Even a one-capital system had proven unworkable, and so Constantinopolis had been founded in the East and the Empire had been divided.

But then, after Saturninus—another of the crazy Emperors—had practically bankrupted the Western Empire in his hopeless attempt to conquer the New World, and set it drifting off into the pathetic era later to be called the Great Decadence, the Eastern realm had taken advantage of the West’s weakness to invade it and then had come the two hundred years of Eastern rule, until the invincible Flavius Romulus restored the Western Empire’s independence. Determined never to allow the East to regain the upper hand, Flavius Romulus had stripped Constantinopolis of its status as a capital city and reunited the severed halves of the Empire a thousand years after their first separation.

But it would take a Flavius Romulus to govern so great a stretch of territory single-handedly, and very few of his successors had been up to the mark. Within a century after his death the throne was in the possession of Demetrius of Vindonissa, a wealthy provincial patrician who just happened to have a streak of hereditary insanity in his family. Both Demetrius’s son Valens Aquila and his grandson Marius Antoninus were notably eccentric Emperors; Marius’s son Lodovicus had been reasonably stable, but he had blithely handed the throne on to his son, the present Emperor Demetrius, who by easy stages had come to make the citizens of Roma believe that they were being ruled once again by Caligula, or Commodus, or Caracalla.

Demetrius II was, at least, not murderous, as those three had been. But his reign, which by now had gone on longer than any of theirs, had been marked by a similar wildness of inspiration. Though he had not, like Caligula, tried to declare himself a god or appoint his horse to the Senate, he had given banquets at which six hundred ostriches were slaughtered at a time, and ordered the sinking of fully laden merchant ships in the harbor at Ostia to demonstrate the Empire’s prodigious wealth. Unlike Commodus he had not amused himself by posing as a surgeon and operating on hapless subjects, but he did, now and then, set tame lions and leopards loose in the guest rooms of the palace to terrify his sleeping friends. He did not, like Caracalla, have his brother and other members of his own family murdered, but he did stage lotteries that all members of his court were required to enter at great expense, in which one man might win ten pounds of gold and another ten dead dogs or a dozen spoiled cabbages.

In the days of the indifferent Valens Aquila and the witless Marius Antoninus such far-off provinces as Syria and Persia began running themselves with very small regard for the decrees of the central government. That in itself caused little alarm in Roma, so long as the exotic goods that those lands exported to the capital continued to arrive. But then, in Lodovicus’s reign, the two provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia, just east of the Italian heartland of the Empire, also tried to break free, and had to be reined in by force. And then, soon after Demetrius II came to power, Sicilia, always a troublesome island of malcontents, chose to cease paying taxes to the Imperial tax collectors. When Demetrius took no action, the movement spread to Belgica and Gallia and Hispania and declarations of independence quickly followed. That, of course, could not be tolerated, even by the likes of Demetrius.

Apollinaris was Consul then, his third time in the office, sharing the Consulship with the feckless drunkard Duilius Eurupianus. Since the time of Maximilianus the Great, at least, the Consulship had been a basically meaningless post, a mere honorific, with nothing like the virtually royal powers it had had in the ancient days of the Republic. As Epictetus had said long ago, the Consulship under the Emperors, having lost nearly all its functions, had degenerated into a post that allowed you nothing more than the privilege of underwriting the games of the Circus and giving free dinners to a lot of undeserving flatterers.

But a crisis now was at hand. Firm action was required. Apollinaris, resigning his Consulship, called upon Eurupianus to do the same, making it clear to him that if he chose to remain in office it would have adverse effects on his health. Then Apollinaris prevailed upon the Emperor, who was preoccupied at the time with forming a collection of venomous serpents from the farthest reaches of the realm, to reappoint him to the Consulship in collaboration with an equally public-spirited citizen, the dour and austere Larcius Torquatus. At Apollinaris’s urgent behest the Emperor agreed that he and Torquatus would be granted emergency powers far beyond any that the Consuls had had for hundreds of years, and would remain in office indefinitely, instead of serving one-year terms at the pleasure of the Emperor. Torquatus would attempt to restore some sanity on the home front; Apollinaris, an experienced soldier, would march through the rebellious provinces, bringing them one after another to heel.

Which had been achieved. Here in Tarraco, Apollinaris was packing up, getting ready to go home.

Tiberius Charax, his aide-de-camp, a slender, narrow-eyed Greek from Ionia who had served at his side for many years, entered and said, “A letter for you from Roma, from the Consul Larcius Torquatus, Count Valerian. Also Prince Laureolus has arrived and is waiting outside to see you.”

Taking the letter from Charax, Apollinaris said, “Send him in.”

He broke the seal and quickly glanced over the text. His fellow Consul, concise as ever, had written, “I have told the Emperor of your successes in the field, and he responds with the usual childishness. As for affairs here at Roma, the problems grow worse all the time. If his spending continues at the present pace the treasury will soon be down to its last denarius. I am planning to take severe measures.” And, with an elaborate flourish, the signature, nearly the size of the text itself: M. Larcius Torquatus, Consul.

Looking up, Apollinaris became aware that Prince Laureolus was in the room.

“Bad news, sir?” the prince asked.

“Infuriating news,” said Apollinaris. He made no effort to hide his smoldering anger. “A letter from Torquatus. The Emperor is running the treasury dry. What did he pay, I wonder, for that mountain of snow he had them set up in his garden last summer? Or for that tunic of plates of gold, studded with diamonds and pearls? And what little expenses are coming next? I fear to guess.”

“The Emperor,” Laureolus said quietly, and a derisive flicker appeared for a moment at one corner of the younger man’s mouth. “Ah! The Emperor, yes.” He needed to say no more.

Apollinaris had come to like the prince a great deal. They were men built to the same general design, short, compact, muscular, though there was little else in the way of physical resemblance, Apollinaris being a man of dark, almost swarthy complexion with a broad triangular nose, a generous mouth, and deep-set coal-black eyes beneath a dense, shaggy brow, while Laureolus was pale, with chilly aristocratic features, a long, narrow high-bridged nose, a thin-lipped mouth, ice-cold eyes of the palest blue. He came from ancient Imperial lineage, tracing his ancestry in some fashion to the Emperor Publius Clemens, who had reigned a hundred years or so before the Byzantine conquest of the Western Empire. Disgusted with the profligate ways of Demetrius II, he had withdrawn five years back to his family’s property in the country to occupy himself with the study of early Roman history and literature. That was how Apollinaris, whose own country home was nearby and who shared Laureolus’s antiquarian interests, had come to meet him. He saw quickly that Laureolus, who was ten years his junior, had the same nostalgia for the strict ethical rigor of the long-vanished Roman Republic that he himself had, and Larcius Torquatus, and virtually no one else in modern Roma.

When he embarked on the War of Reunification Apollinaris had chosen the prince to be his second in command, sending him shuttling from one newly pacified province to another to see to it that the process of restoring full Imperial control went smoothly forward in each of them. Lately Laureolus had been in northern Gallia, where there had been some minor disturbances at a place called Bononia, on the coast along the channel that divided Gallia from Britannia. Thinking that this renewal of the troubles might spread across the channel to the previously unrebellious Britannia, he had repressed it rigorously. Now, with all resistance to the Imperial government at last wiped out, he had come to Tarraco to present Apollinaris with his final report on the state of the provinces.

Apollinaris leafed quickly through it and set it aside. “All is well, I see. I need stay here no longer.”

Laureolus said, “And when you return to the capital, sir, will you attempt to get Demetrius to restrain himself a little?”

“I? Don’t be silly. I know better than to try to tell an Emperor what he ought to do. History is full of tales of the sad fates of those who tried it. Go back and reread your Suetonius, your Tacitus, your Ammianus Marcellinus. No, Laureolus, I’m going back to my estate in the country. Four Consulships is quite enough for me. Anyway, my fellow Consul Marcus Larcius has the responsibility for affairs in Urbs Roma.” He tapped Torquatus’s letter. “He tells me here that he’s going to take severe measures to clean things up. Good for him, if he can do it.”

“Can he do it single-handedly?” Laureolus asked.

“No. No, probably not.” He shot a glance at the prince. “How would you like to be Consul, Laureolus?”

“Me, sir?” Laureolus’s eyes were wide with astonishment.

“You, yes.” Then Apollinaris shook his head. “No, I suppose not. Demetrius would never allow it. You’re of royal blood, after all. He’d see it as the prelude to his own overthrow.” Smiling, he said, “Well, it was just a thought. You and Torquatus, between you, might just be able to do the job. But it’s probably safer for your health to stay out of the capital, anyway. You go back to your estate, too. We’ll get together once a week and have a good meal and discuss ancient history, and let Torquatus worry about the mess in Roma. Eh, Laureolus? We’ve worked hard out here in the provinces for five whole years. I think we deserve a rest, don’t you?”

In his wood-paneled office at the top of the nine-story Consular building at the eastern end of the Forum the Consul Larcius Torquatus stacked and restacked the pile of documents on his desk, tidying their edges with a fastidiousness that one might not have expected in a man of so massive and heavy-set a build. Then he stared fiercely up at the two prefects of the Fiscus, who had delivered these papers an hour ago and now were sitting uneasily in front of him. “If I’ve read these correctly, and I think I have, then there’s no single department of the Imperial government that even came close to staying within its budget in the last fiscal year. That’s correct, isn’t it, Silanus?”

The Prefect of the Fiscus Publicus nodded unhappily. His famously buoyant spirits were nowhere in evidence just now. “This is so, Consul.”

“And you, Cestius,” Torquatus said, turning his glare in the direction of the Prefect of the Fiscus Imperialis. “You tell me here that the Emperor overdrew his personal funds last year by thirty-one million sesterces, and you made the deficit good by borrowing the money from Silanus?”

“Yes, sir,” big round-bellied Cestius said in the smallest of voices.

“How could you? Where’s your sense of responsibility to the nation, to the Senate, to your own conscience? The Emperor squanders thirty-one million on top of what he’s already got on hand for squandering, which must be immense, and you simply grab it out of the funds with which we’re supposed to be repairing the bridges and sweeping the dung out of the stables and paying Apollinaris’s soldiers? I ask you again: how could you?”

A flicker of defiance glowed in Cestius’s eyes. “You’d do better to ask, how couldn’t I, Consul. Would you have me tell the Emperor to his face that he’s spending too much? How long, do you think, would it take him to find a new Prefect of the Fiscus Imperialis? And how long would it take me to find a new head?”

Torquatus responded with a snort. “Your responsibility, Cestius, what about your responsibility? Even if it does cost you your head, it’s your job to prevent the Emperor from overspending. Otherwise why do we have a Prefect of the Fiscus at all?—And you, Silanus? By what right did you grant Cestius’s request for those thirty-one million? You weren’t being asked to confront the Emperor here, only to say no to Cestius. But you didn’t do it. Is saving your friend’s neck more important to you than the financial welfare of the Empire, which you are sworn to defend?”

Silanus, shamefaced, offered no reply.

Torquatus said, finally, “Shall I ask for your resignations?”

“You can have mine at any time,” said Cestius.

“And mine, sir,” Silanus said.

“Yes. Yes. And then I replace you with—whom? You two are the only worthwhile men in the whole administration, and neither of you is worth very much at all. But at least you keep honest accounts.—You do keep honest accounts, don’t you? The deficit isn’t even bigger than these documents of yours claim it is?”

“The accounts are accurate ones, sir,” said Silanus stiffly.

“The gods be thanked for small mercies, then.—No, keep your jobs. But I want reports of a different sort from you both from now on. I want the names of the spenders. A detailed list: department heads, the ones who encourage the Emperor in his folly, those who sign the vouchers authorizing the payouts that you two are so ready to approve. And not just the department heads but anyone in the chain of command who is in a position to say no to spending requests and conspicuously fails to do so.”

The two prefects were staring at him, horrified.

“Names, sir?” Cestius asked. “Of all such people?”

“Their names, yes.”

“So that they can be reprimanded?”

“So that they can be removed from office,” said the Consul. “The entire pack of them will go, the worst ones first, but every last one of them, eventually. Since the Emperor can’t be controlled, we’ll control the men who serve him. I want the first lists by tomorrow afternoon.” Torquatus waved them from the room. “No. Tomorrow morning,” he said, when they were at the door.

But he did not intend to wait even that long to begin making a list of his own. He knew who the first victims of the purge would have to be: the entourage of the Emperor’s own household, the little cluster of parasitical lickspittles and sycophants and leeches who hovered about him day and night, egging foolish Demetrius on to ever greater triumphs of grotesque improvidence and lining their own pockets with the pieces of gold that went spilling away on all sides.

He knew the names, most of them. The officials of the cubiculo, the Emperor’s intimate attendants, his grooms and pimps and butlers, many of them men of immense wealth in their own right, who went home from the royal palace every night to pleasant palaces of their own: there was Polybius, there was Hilarion—two Greeks, he thought, clamping his lips in displeasure—and the Hebrew, Judas Antonius Soranus, and the private secretary, Statius, and the royal cobbler, Claudius Nero, who made the fabulous jewel-encrusted shoes that Demetrius would never wear twice, and the court physician who prescribed such costly rarities as medicines for the monarch, taking his own percentage from the suppliers—what was his name, Mallo, Trallo, something like that?—and the architect, Tiberius Ulpius Draco, who as Minister of Public Works had built all those useless new palaces for the Emperor, and then had torn them down and built even grander ones on their sites—

No, Draco had died a year or two ago, probably of shame over his own misdeeds, for as Torquatus remembered him he was fundamentally an honorable man. But there were plenty of others to go on the list. Gradually, over the next hour, Torquatus added name after name, until he had fifty or sixty of them. A good beginning, that. His fury mounted as he contemplated their sins. A cold fury, it was, for he was by nature a frosty man.

After twenty years it was time, and long past time, to put a stop to Demetrius’s imbecilic prodigality, before he brought the Empire down about him. Whatever the risks, Torquatus meant to place himself in the Emperor’s way. It was in his blood, his loyalty to the Empire. A Torquatus had been Consul in the time of Marcus Aurelius, and another in the reign of Diocletianus, and there had been other great Torquati along the way, and now he was the Torquatus of the era, the Consul Marcus Larcius Torquatus, adding distinction to his line. Those other Torquati looked down on him out of history. He knew he must save Roma for them.

This Roma, he thought, this Empire, to which we have devoted so much loyalty, so great a part of our lives, for these two thousand years past—

For a moment he supposed that the best tactic would be to round up five or six of the Emperor’s henchmen at a time, extracting them piecemeal from the Emperor’s proximity so that Demetrius might not notice what was going on, but then he saw that that was precisely the wrong approach. Get them all, right away, a single bold sweep, the way Apollinaris had handled things in the provinces. Out of the palace, into the prisons: bring the situation to immediate resolution. Yes. That was the way.

He imagined the conversation with the Emperor that would follow.

“Where are my beloved friends? Where is Statius? Where is Hilarion? What has become of Claudius Nero?”

“All of them under arrest, your majesty. Crimes against the state. We have reached such a precarious position that we can no longer afford the luxury of having such people in your household.”

“My doctor! My cobbler!”

“Dangerous to the welfare of the nation, Caesar. Dangerous in the extreme. I have had spies out among the people in the taverns, and they are talking revolution. They are saying that the streets and bridges and public buildings are going unrepaired, that there is no money available for distribution to the populace, that the war in the provinces is likely to break out again at any moment—and that the Emperor must be removed before things get even worse.”

“Removed? The Emperor? Me?”

“They cry out for a return to the Republic.”

Demetrius would laugh at that. “The Republic! People have been crying out for a return to the Republic for the last eighteen hundred years! They were saying it in Augustus’s time, ten minutes after he threw the Republic overboard. They don’t mean it. They know the Emperor is the father of the country, their beloved prince, the one essential figure who—”

“No, your majesty, this time they mean it.” And Torquatus would sketch for the Emperor a vivid, terrifying picture of what a revolution would mean, laying it on as thickly as he knew how, the uprising in the streets, Senators hunted down, some of them slaughtered in their beds, and, above all, the massacre of the royal family, blood flowing, the Imperial museums looted, the burning of palaces and governmental buildings, the desecration of temples. The Emperor himself, Demetrius II Augustus Caesar, crucified in the Forum. Better yet: crucified head downward, hanging there dizzy with agony, while the jeering populace threw rocks or perhaps hurled spears—

Yes. Ten minutes of that and he would have Demetrius cowering in his golden sandals, wetting his purple robe in fear. He would retreat into his palace and hide himself there among his toys and his mistresses and his tame lions and tigers. Meanwhile the trials would go forward, the miscreants would rapidly be found guilty of their embezzlements and malfeasances, sent into exile in the remote provinces of the realm—

Exile?

Exile might be too risky, Torquatus thought. Exiles sometimes find their way home—seek vengeance—

Something more permanent than exile might be a wiser idea, he told himself.

He scratched away with his stylus. The list grew and grew. Apollinaris would be proud of him. Constantly quoting ancient history at him, telling him how much better things had been under the Republic, when staunch stoic men like Cato the Elder and Furius Camillus and Aemilius Paulus set examples of self-denial and discipline for all the nation. “The Empire is in profound need of purification,” Apollinaris liked to say: Torquatus had heard him say it a thousand times. So it was. And by the time the Count got back from Gallia or Lusitania or wherever he was right now, he would discover that that profoundly needed purification was already under way.

They will all die, he told himself: these parasites who surround the Emperor, these caterpillars who devour the commonwealth.

That something strange was going on at Roma began to become apparent to Apollinaris in the first minutes after the merchant vessel that had brought him from Tarraco had reached the harbor at Ostia. The familiar ritual in which the customs officials of the port came aboard, received their bribes, and presented a perfunctory bill of duty payable did not take place. Instead there was an actual search, six men in the black-and-gold uniforms of the Imperial treasury poking through the ship’s hold and making a formal tally of the cargo, item by item.

In theory all merchandise shipped into Italia from the provinces for resale was subject to customs duties. In practice, the customs inspectors, having paid stiff bribes to the secretariat of their department to get their jobs, skimmed off most of the customs revenue and allowed only a fraction of the legitimate amount to dribble through to the Imperial Treasury. Everyone knew it, but no one seemed to care. Apollinaris himself disliked the arrangement, even though he did not see why transfers of merchandise from one part of the Empire to another should be subject to customs charges in the first place. But the bribing of customs officials in lieu of paying duty was only one out of myriad practices of the Imperial regime that cried out for reform, and in any event the affairs of merchants and shippers had never been anything to which he had devoted much attention.

Today’s process, though, caused unusual delays in disembarking. After a time he sent for the ship’s captain, a genial black-bearded Carthaginian, and asked what was going on.

The captain, who was livid with dismay and indignation, wasn’t sure. New procedures, he said. Some sort of shakeup in the Department of Customs, that was all he knew.

Apollinaris guessed at first that it might have something to do with the revenue shortfall about which Torquatus had written him: the Emperor, running low on cash, had instructed his officials to start increasing governmental revenues. Then he realized how little sense that notion made. Demetrius had never shown any awareness that there was a relationship between governmental income and Imperial expenditure. No, this must be the doing of Torquatus himself, Apollinaris decided: one of the “severe measures” that his co-Consul had said he would be taking in order to set things to rights.

From Ostia, Apollinaris went straight to the suburban villa that he maintained along the Via Flaminia, just north of the city wall. It had been in the care of his younger brother, Romulus Claudius Apollinaris, during the five years of his absence, and Apollinaris was pleased to discover that Romulus Claudius, although he too had been absent from Roma most of that time and was living up in Umbria right now, had had the place kept up as though his brother might require its use at any moment.

His homeward route took him through the heart of the city. It was good to be back in Roma, to see the ancient buildings again, two thousand years of history standing forth on every street, the marble walls of temples and government offices, some as old as Augustus and Tiberius, mellowed by time despite centuries of ongoing repair, and the medieval buildings, solid and a little coarse, their ornate façades throbbing in the hot sunlight, and then the new buildings of the Decadence, all strange parapets and soaring flying buttresses and sudden startling cantilevered wings, like those of some great beetle, leaping off into space. How glad he was to see it all! Even the heat stirred some gladness in him. It was the month of Julius, hot and humid, a time when the river ran very low, turbid, choked with yellow silt. The day’s heat held the city in its tight grip. Far away, lightning sounded—a dry crack, lightning without rain, the sinister thunder of the absent-minded gods. There was a malarious stench in the air. He had forgotten how Roma stank in the summer, during all those years he had spent off in the lesser cities of the western provinces. Roma was the grandest city that ever was or would be, but there was no escaping the truth of its odor this time of year, the effluvia of a million people, their discarded rotting food, their wastes, the sweat of those million bodies. He was a fastidious man. He disliked the heat, the stench, the dirt. And yet, yet—this was Roma, and there was no city like it!

When Apollinaris reached his villa he sent word to Torquatus that he had returned and would be pleased to meet with him as soon as possible, and at once a messenger came back from Torquatus inviting him to dine at his house that evening.

That was a doubtful pleasure. Apollinaris, for all his scholarly interest in the stoic virtues of Republican Roma, was a civilized and cultivated man who appreciated fine wines and imaginative cooking. His colleague in the Consulship was of another kind entirely, very much an Old Roman in his distaste for comfort and luxury—a ponderous, wintry-souled sort who showed little interest in food or wine or literature or philosophy, indeed whose only pleasurable pursuit, so far as Apollinaris knew, was to hunt wild boar in the snow-choked forests of the northern provinces.

But this night Torquatus’s table was set for a person of Apollinaris’s tastes, with any number of wines and sherbets and a splendid main course of spiced venison. There was no entertainment—dancers and musicians would not be appropriate for such a meeting—and just the two of them were at the table. Apollinaris had never married and Torquatus’s wife, who was seldom seen in public, made no appearance even in her own home this evening.

He had indeed made changes in the customs procedures, he told Apollinaris. He had made other changes as well. The whole depraved crew that surrounded the Emperor had been rounded up and taken away. There would be no more wild spending sprees on Demetrius’s part. Torquatus had instituted reforms on every level of the government, as well. Corrupt officials had been removed. Regulations that had been on the books for decades but never enforced were now being applied. All governmental departments had been ordered to draw up new budgets and they would be required to live within them.

“And the Emperor?” Apollinaris asked, when Torquatus finally paused in his recitation. “How has he taken your dismissal of his coterie of flunkies? I see your head is still on its shoulders, so you must have found some way of pacifying him, but what could it have been?”

“His Majesty is not in any position to order executions these days,” said Torquatus. “His Majesty is currently under house arrest.”

Apollinaris felt a stab of amazement.

“Do you seriously mean that? Yes, yes, of course you do. You always seriously mean it.—Penned up in his own palace, is he?”

“In the palace guest-house, actually. That new building, the weird-looking one with those bizarre mosaics. I have troops posted on duty around it twenty-four hours a day.”

“But surely the Praetorian Guard wouldn’t have allowed—”

“I took the precaution of having the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard removed from office, and replaced him with a man of my own staff, a certain Atilius Rullianus. The Praetorians have received a generous payment and have willingly taken an oath of allegiance to their new prefect.”

“Yes. They usually do, if paid well enough.”

“And so we keep Demetrius well supplied with women and food, but otherwise he is completely isolated. He has no contact with any of the officials of his court, or with the members of the Senate. Naturally I stay away from him also. You will, I hope, keep your distance from him yourself, Apollinaris. Essentially you and I, jointly, are the Emperor, now. All governmental decrees flow from the Consular office; all governmental officials report to us.”

Apollinaris gave Torquatus a keen, close look. “So you intend to keep the Emperor a prisoner for the rest of his life? You know there’ll be problems with that, man. Crazy or not, the Emperor is expected to present himself before the people at certain times of the year. The New Year festival, the opening of the new Senate session, the first day of the season’s games at the Colosseum—you can’t just hide him away indefinitely, you know, without arousing a little curiosity about where he is.”

“For the moment,” said Torquatus, “it has been announced that His Majesty is ill. I think we can leave it at that for the time being. How fast he recovers—well, we can deal with that issue later. There are other problems.”

“Such as?”

“The Senate, for one. You may or may not be aware that a goodly number of Senators have been quite comfortable with Demetrius’s way of doing things. The general corruption spills over to them as well. With no real Emperor to hold them accountable, they do as they please, and plenty of them live like little Demetriuses themselves. The kind of orgiastic existences that Roma was famous for in Nero’s time, I mean. We can’t allow a return to that kind of thing. The Senate is in need of some reform itself. If it doesn’t get it, many of its members will try to obstruct our program.”

“I see,” Apollinaris said. “Are you talking about removing certain Senators from office, then?”

“That might be necessary.”

“But only an Emperor can do that.”

“We will do it in the name of the Emperor,” said Torquatus. “As we do everything else that must be done.”

“Ah,” Apollinaris said. “I see. In the name of the Emperor.”

For the first time he noticed how tired Torquatus looked. Torquatus was a big man, of formidable physical strength and legendary endurance; but his eyes, Apollinaris saw, were reddened with fatigue, and his heavy-jowled face was drawn and sallow.

“There’s even more to deal with,” Torquatus went on.

“More than dismissing the whole court, imprisoning the Emperor, and purging the Senate?”

“I refer to the possibility of a general uprising of the people,” Torquatus said portentously.

“Because of the reforms you’ve been instituting, you mean?”

“On the contrary. My reforms are the salvation of the Empire, and sooner or later everyone will see that—if we can hold things together until that point. But the people may not allow us enough time to explain things to them. You’ve been away these five years and you don’t know what’s been happening here. I want you to come with me to the Subura tomorrow.”

“The Subura,” Apollinaris said. He pressed his hands together and brought the tips of his fingers to his lips. The Subura, as he recalled, was an ancient slum district of the capital, a filthy, smelly place of dark alleys and crooked streets that led nowhere. Every few hundred years some civic-minded Emperor would order it cleaned out and rebuilt, but its innate nature was unconquerable and the pestilential nature of the place always managed to reassert itself in a couple of generations. “The Subura is restless, is it? A few truckloads of free bread and wine can fix that, I’d think.”

“Wrong. Those people have plenty to eat as it is. For all of Demetrius’s excesses, this is still a prosperous land. And, whatever you think, revolutions don’t spring up because of poverty. It’s the passion for novelty, the pursuit of excitement, that does it. Revolution is the fruit of idleness and leisure, not of poverty.”

“The idleness and leisure of the slum-dwellers of the Subura,” Apollinaris said, gazing thoughtfully at the other man. It was an interesting concept, marvelous in its complete absurdity.

But it appeared that Torquatus found a certain logic in it. “Yes. Amid the general breakdown of law and order, this thing that some people call the Decadence, they’ve come to see that nobody’s really in charge of anything any more. And so they want to get themselves a bigger share of the loot. Overthrow the monarchy, butcher all the patricians, divide up the wealth among themselves. I’ve been in their taverns, Apollinaris. I’ve listened to their harangues. You come with me tomorrow and sit down next to them and you’ll hear the same things yourself.”

“Two Consuls, going freely and unguarded into slum taverns?”

“They’ll have no idea who we are. I’ll show you how to dress.”

“It would be interesting, I suppose. But, thank you, no. I’ll take your word for it: there’s restlessness in the Subura. But we still have an army, Torquatus. I’ve just spent five years pacifying the provinces. I can pacify the Subura too, if I have to.”

“Turn the Roman army against the citizens of the capital? Think about it, my friend. The agitators in the Subura must be dealt with before the real trouble breaks out.—I agree, a great deal for you to consider on your first day back. But there’s no time to waste. We face a very big job.” Torquatus signaled to a slave who was waiting nearby to refill their glasses. “Enough of this talk for the moment, all right? What do you think of this wine? Forty-year-old Falernian, it is. From the Emperor’s own cellars, I should tell you. I had some brought here especially for this occasion.”

“Quite splendid,” said Apollinaris. “But age has made it a trifle bitter. Would you pass me the honey, Torquatus?”

Charax said, “This is the list so far, sir.”

Apollinaris took the sheet of paper from his aide-de-camp and ran quickly down the names. “Statius—Claudius Nero—Judas Antonius Soranus—who are these people, Charax?”

“Lucius Status is the Emperor’s private secretary. Soranus is a Hebrew who is said to import unusual animals from Africa for his collection. I have no information about Claudius Nero, sir, but he is probably a craftsman to the court.”

“Ah.” Apollinaris turned his attention back to the list. “Hilarion and Polybius, yes. The personal attendants. I remember those two. Oily little bastards, both of them. Glitius Agricola. Gaius Callistus. Marco Cornuto—what kind of name is that, ‘Marco Cornuto?’”

“A Roman name, sir. I mean, it’s Roman in language, not Latin.”

That puzzled him. “Latin—Roman—what’s the difference?”

“The lower classes speak some rough new kind of language now that they call ‘Roman,’ a dialect—the dialect of the people, it’s called. Derived from Latin, the way the languages of the provinces are. It’s like an easier, sloppier form of Latin. They’ve begun translating their own names into it, I hear. This Marco Cornuto is probably one of the Emperor’s coachmen, or a stable groom, something along those lines.”

Apollinaris made a face. He very much disliked the custom, of late so prevalent out in the provinces, of speaking local dialects that were coarse, vulgar versions of Latin mixed with primitive regional words: one way of speaking in Gallia, another in Hispania, another in Britannia, and still another, very different from the others, in the Teutonic provinces. He had suppressed the use of those languages, those dialects, wherever he had encountered it. So now it was happening here, too? “What sense does that make, a new dialect of Latin used right here in Roma? In the provinces, those dialects are a way of signifying independence from the Empire. But Roma can’t secede from itself, can it?”

Charax merely smiled and shrugged.

Apollinaris remembered now what Torquatus had told him about the restlessness in the slums, the likelihood of some kind of uprising among the plebeians. Was a new bastard form of Latin beginning to establish itself among the poor, a private language of their own, setting them apart from the hated aristocrats? It was worth investigating. He knew from his experiences in the provinces what power language could have in fomenting political unrest.

He looked once more at the list of those whom Torquatus had arrested.

“Matius—Licentius—Licinius—Caesius Bassius—” He looked up. “What do these little red marks next to some of the names mean?”

“Those are the ones who have already been executed,” Charax said.

“Did you say ‘executed’?” Apollinaris asked, startled.

“Put to death, yes,” said Charax. “You seem surprised. I thought you knew, sir.”

“No,” Apollinaris said. “I haven’t heard anything about executions.”

“At the far end of the Forum, in the little plaza in front of the Arch of Marcus Anastasius: he’s had a platform set up there, and every afternoon there have been executions all week, four or five a day.”

“‘He’?”

“Larcius Torquatus, sir,” Charax said, in the tone of one who was explaining something to a child.

Apollinaris nodded. This was the tenth day since his return to Roma, and they had been busy days. Torquatus had never given him a chance, at their first meeting in Torquatus’s home, to explain that it was his intention to give up his Consulship and retire to private life. And once he had heard what Torquatus had been up to—putting the Emperor under house arrest, throwing His Majesty’s playmates into prison, issuing a raft of stringent new decrees designed to cleanse the government of corruption—Apollinaris had realized that his notion of retiring was an impossible one. Torquatus’s program, commendable though it was, was so radical that he could not be left to carry it out alone. That would make him, in effect, dictator of Roma, and Apollinaris knew from his readings in history that the only kind of dictators Roma would tolerate were those who, like Augustus Caesar, were able to conceal their dictatorial ways behind a façade of constitutional legitimacy. A mere appointive Consul, ruling on his own after overthrowing the Emperor, would not be able to sustain himself in power unless he assumed the Imperial powers himself. Apollinaris did not want to see Torquatus do that. Maintaining the Consular system was essential now. And Torquatus must have a legitimate Consular colleague if he wanted his reforms to have any success.

So Apollinaris had put all thought of retirement aside and had spent his first days back reestablishing his presence at the capital, setting up his office in the Consular building, renewing his connections with the important men of the Senate, and otherwise resuming his life at the center of power. He had met daily with his colleague Torquatus, who assured him that the work of purging the commonwealth of idlers and parasites was moving along smoothly, but up until now Apollinaris had not pressed him for details. That had been a mistake, he realized now. Torquatus’s policy of ending the drain on the public treasury that the Emperor’s huge mob of hangers-on had created was one that he had applauded, of course. But it had never occurred to Apollinaris that his co-Consul was having them killed. And his travels around the city since his return had not taken him anywhere near that little plaza of Marcus Anastasius, the place of execution where heads rolled in the dust by order of M. Larcius Torquatus.

“Perhaps I should have a little talk with Torquatus about this,” Apollinaris said, rising and tucking the list of the arrested men into a fold of his robe.

Torquatus’s office was one floor above Apollinaris’s in the Consular building. In the old days the two Consuls had divided the ninth floor between themselves: that was how it had been in Apollinaris’s first three terms as Consul, certainly. The first time, as junior Consul, he had used the office on the eastern side of the building, looking down into Trajan’s Forum. During his second and third terms, when he now was senior Consul, he had moved over to the somewhat more imposing rooms on the western side of the top floor. But during Apollinaris’s long absence in the provinces Torquatus had expanded his own Consular domain into the part of the floor that had previously been his, and had set up a secondary office for his colleague on the building’s eighth floor. “The Consul’s tasks have increased so greatly since we reconstituted the post,” Torquatus explained, a little shamefacedly, when Apollinaris, having returned, had showed up to reclaim his old office. “You were away fighting in Sicilia and probably wouldn’t be back for two or three years, and I needed more room close at hand for the additional staff members that now were required, et cetera, et cetera—”

The new arrangement rankled more than a little, but this was not the moment, Apollinaris felt, to start quarreling with his co-Consul about office space. There would be time to express concern over matters of precedence and status once things were a little more stable at the capital.

Torquatus was busily signing papers when Apollinaris arrived. He seemed unaware, for a moment, that his fellow Consul had entered the room. Then he looked up and offered Apollinaris a quick apologetic smile. “So much paperwork—”

“Signing more death warrants, are you?”

Apollinaris had meant the statement to sound neutral, even bland. But Torquatus’s frowning response told him that he had not quite succeeded.

“As a matter of fact, Apollinaris, I am. Does that trouble you?”

“A little, perhaps. I don’t think I understood that you were actually going to have Demetrius’s people put to death.”

“I thought we had discussed it.”

“Not in so many words. You said you were ‘removing’ them, I think. I don’t recall your explicitly explaining what you meant by that.” Already a defensive iciness was visible in Torquatus’s eyes. Apollinaris brought forth the list of prisoners that Charax had procured for him and said, “Do you think it’s wise, Torquatus, to inflict such severe penalties on such trivial people? The Emperor’s barber? The Emperor’s clown?”

“You’ve been away from the capital many years,” Torquatus said. “These men are not such simple innocents as you may think. I send no one lightly to his death.”

“Even so, Torquatus—”

Smoothly Torquatus cut him off. “Consider our choices, if you will. Strip them of office but let them go free? Then they remain among us, stirring up trouble, conniving to get themselves back to their high positions in the palace. We merely imprison them? Then we must maintain them at public expense, perhaps for the rest of their lives. Send them into exile? Then they take their illicitly gained wealth with them, which otherwise we could recapture for the treasury. No, Apollinaris, getting rid of them once and for all is the only solution. If we allow them to live, sooner or later they’ll manage to get access to His Majesty again and begin working him up to overthrow us.”

“So we put them to death to minimize the risks to ourselves?”

“The risks to the Empire,” Torquatus said. “Do you think I care that much about my own life? But if we fall, the Empire falls with us. These men are the enemies of the commonwealth. You and I are all that stand between them and the reign of chaos. They have to go. I thought we had already come to full agreement on that point.”

In no way was that statement true, Apollinaris knew. Yet he saw the validity of the argument. The Empire stood, not for the first time, at the brink of anarchy. The disturbances in the provinces had given early warning of that. Augustus had created the Imperium by dint of military force, and it was the army that had sustained the Emperors on their thrones all these centuries. But Emperors ruled, ultimately, by the consent of the governed. No army was strong enough to compel the populace to accept the authority of a wicked or crazy Emperor indefinitely: that had been shown again and again, from the time of Caligula and Nero on up through history. Demetrius was plainly crazy; most of the government officials were demonstrably corrupt; if Torquatus was right that the plebeians were muttering about a revolution, and it was altogether possible that he was right about that, then a fierce purge of the corruption and craziness might be the only way of heading off calamity. And to allow Demetrius’s minions to live, and to regroup, and to regain the Emperor’s ear, was to invite that very calamity.

“Very well,” said Apollinaris. “How far do you intend to carry this, though?”

“As far as the situation demands,” Torquatus said.

The month of Julius gave way to the month of Augustus, and the worst summer in Roma’s long history went grinding on, intolerable heat, choking humidity, low ominous clouds hiding the sun, lightning in the hills but never any rain, tensions rising, tempers snapping everywhere as the daily procession of carts bearing the latest batches of the condemned rolled onward toward the executioner’s block. Great throngs came to watch each day, commoners and patricians alike, looking toward the headsman and his victims in the fascinated way one stares at a weaving serpent making ready to strike. The spectacle of horror was terrifying but no one could stay away. The reek of blood hung over Roma. With each passing day the city grew more pure, and much more frightened, paralyzed by fear and suspicion.

“Five weeks now,” said Lactantius Rufus, who was the presiding magistrate of the Senate, “and the killing has spread into our own House itself.”

“Pactumeius Pollio, tried and found guilty,” Julius Papinio said. He stood closest to Rufus among the little group of men on the portico of the Senate this sizzling, steamy morning.

“Likewise Marcus Florianus,” said the rotund Terentius Figulus.

“And Macrinus,” said Flavius Lollianus.

“And Fulpianus.”

“That’s it, I think. Four all together.”

“Four Senators, yes,” said Lactantius Rufus. “So far. But who’s next, I ask you? You? Me? Where does it stop? Death is king in Roma these days. This whole House is endangered, my friends.” He was a great sickle of a man, enormously tall, stoop-shouldered, his back curving in a wide arc, his face in profile a jagged blade of angular features. For more than thirty years he had been a prominent member of the Senate: a confidant of the late Emperor Lodovicus, a close adviser to the present Emperor Demetrius, a three-time holder of the Consulship. “We must find a way of protecting ourselves.”

“What do you suggest?” Papinio asked. “Shall we call upon the Emperor to remove the Consuls?”

It was said in a halfhearted way. Papinio and all the others knew how ludicrous a suggestion that was. “Let me remind you,” Lactantius said anyway, “that the Emperor is a prisoner himself.”

“So he is,” Papinio conceded. “All power lies with the Consuls now.”

“Quite true,” Rufus said. “And therefore our task must be to drive a wedge between them. We should go, three or four of us, or perhaps five, as a delegation to Apollinaris. He’s a reasonable man. Surely he sees the damage Torquatus is doing, the risk that these purges, if they continue, will get out of hand and run through Roma like a wildfire. We ask him to remove Torquatus from office and name a new colleague.”

“To remove Torquatus from office—!” said Terentius Figulus, astounded. “You make it sound so easy! But could he do it?”

“Apollinaris has just reconquered four or five whole provinces without any serious difficulty. Why would he have any trouble overcoming one man?”

“What if he doesn’t want to?” Papinio asked. “What if he approves of what Torquatus has been doing?”

“Then we remove them both,” replied Rufus. “But let’s keep that for a last resort. Which of you will come with me to Apollinaris?”

“I,” said Papinio immediately. But no one else spoke out.

Rufus looked about at the others. “Well?” he said. “Figulus? Lollianus? What about you, Priscus? Salvius Julianus?”

In the end Rufus managed to collect just two companions for his mission, the ever-ambitious Julius Papinio and another Senator named Gaius Lucius Frontinus, a younger man whose family had enormous wine-producing properties in southern Italia. Though these were busy times in the Consular office—the Consuls’ days were consumed by the task of purification, making out arrest orders, attending trials, authorizing the executions of those found guilty, which was nearly everyone placed on trial—they had surprisingly little difficulty gaining an audience with the Consul Valerian Apollinaris. But winning his support was not quite so easy.

“What you’re asking is treasonous, as you surely must know,” said Apollinaris calmly. He had remained seated behind his desk; the others stood before him. “By suggesting that one constitutionally appointed Consul should depose his colleague, you’re inviting me to join the conspiracy that you apparently have formed to overthrow the legitimate government of the Empire. That in itself is a capital offense. I could have you whisked off to prison this very minute. Before the end of the week you’d be staring at the headsman’s axe. Eh, Rufus? Papinio? Frontinus?”

It was impossible to tell whether he meant it as a threat or as a joke. Lactantius Rufus, steadfastly meeting the Consul’s coolly appraising gaze, said, “You’d probably follow us there in the next week or two, Count Apollinaris. Certainly you, of all people, must understand how dangerous Torquatus is to everybody’s welfare, certainly to ours and yours, perhaps even to his own.”

“Dangerous to yours, yes. But why to mine? I’ve backed Torquatus in all of his actions, haven’t I? So why would my respected Consular colleague turn against me?”

“Because the way things are going,” said Rufus, “the removal of Emperor Demetrius will become a political necessity somewhere down the line, more likely sooner than later. And the Emperor has no sons. The heir to the throne is his addlepated and utterly incapable brother Marius, who sits quietly giggling to himself in his palace on Capreae. He can never reign. You and Torquatus are the only plausible successors to Demetrius in sight. But you can’t both become Emperor. Do you see my logic, Apollinaris?”

“Of course I do. But I have no intention of having the Emperor killed, and I doubt that Torquatus does either, or he’d have done it already.”

Rufus sighed. “Unless he’s simply biding his time. But let that be as it may: perhaps you don’t feel that you’re in any danger, dear Apollinaris, but we certainly do. Four members of the Senate are dead already. Others are probably on the proscribed list. Torquatus is drunk with power, killing people as quickly as he can, scores of them. Some of them very much deserved their fate. In other cases Torquatus is simply settling old personal accounts. To claim that the Senator Pactumeius Pollio was an enemy of the realm—or Marcus Florianus—”

“To save your skins, then, you want me to lift my hand against my colleague in violation of my oaths. And if I refuse?”

“The Senate, with the Emperor indisposed, has the power to strip you and Torquatus both of your Consulships.”

“Do you think so? And if you can manage to bring it off, who will our replacements be? You, Rufus? Young Frontinus here? And would the people ever accept you as their leaders? You know perfectly well that Torquatus and I are the only men left in this rotting Empire who have the strength to keep things from falling apart.” Apollinaris smiled and shook his head. “No, Rufus. You’re just bluffing. You have no candidates to take our places.”

“Agreed,” Rufus said, without any hesitation. “This is certainly so. But if you refuse us, you’ll leave us no choice but to try to strike Torquatus down ourselves, and we may very well fail, which will plunge everything into disorder and turmoil as he takes his revenge. You and you alone can save Roma from him. You must remove him and take sole command, and make an end to this reign of terror before a river of Senatorial blood runs in the streets.”

“You want me to be Emperor, then?”

This time Rufus, taken by surprise, did hesitate before replying. “Do you want to be?”

“No. Never. If I take sole command, though, I would be acting essentially as an Emperor. Before long, as you correctly foresee, I would be Emperor. But the throne has no appeal for me. The most I want is to be Consul.”

“Be Consul, then. Get rid of Torquatus and appoint some congenial partner, anyone you like. But you have to stop him before he devours us all. Yourself included, I warn you, Apollinaris.”

When the three Senators had left his office Apollinaris sat quietly for a time, replaying the discussion in his mind. There was no denying the truth of anything Rufus had said.

Rufus was grasping and manipulative, of course, as anyone of his great wealth and long occupation of a position close to the centers of Imperial power could be expected to be. But he was not really evil, as powerful men went, and he was certainly no fool. He saw very clearly, and Apollinaris saw it as well, how unlikely it was that there would be any end to Torquatus’s frenzied purification of the realm, that not only were prominent Senators like Lactantius Rufus in obvious danger but that it would go on and on until the list of victims included Count Valerian Apollinaris himself.

That was inevitable. Apollinaris, though he had approved from the start of the need to call a halt to the Emperor Demetrius’s excesses and purge the court of its parasites, had seen Torquatus’s zealousness growing day by day. And he was far from comfortable with the extreme nature of Torquatus’s methods—midnight arrests, secret trials, verdict within an hour, execution the next day.

Now that Torquatus had succeeded in establishing death as a valid penalty for undermining the moral fiber of the Empire, the list of potential victims of the purge had become almost infinite, too. Demetrius’s clump of odious hangers-on, some of them truly vicious and some mere witless buffoons, was gone now. So were dozens of the most corrupt members of the bureaucracy and four of their facilitators in the Senate. And, yes, just as Rufus had guessed, many more indictments were pending. Torquatus’s concentration was focused now on the unrest in the Subura, where the ordinary theft and vandalism had given way to rioting and anarchic outcries against the government. Soon Torquatus would be executing plebeians, too. If left unchecked he would purge Roma from top to bottom.

That a cleansing of the commonwealth had been in order was something that Apollinaris did not question. Despite his reservations he had made no attempt to interfere in what Torquatus had been doing these five weeks past. But it was clear to him now that Torquatus had begun ruling almost as a dictator, a murderous one at that, and that as Torquatus’s Consular colleague he was expected to continue to join him in that role, or else face the possibility of becoming a victim of Torquatus’s zeal himself. For a time would come—if it was not already at hand—when it would be necessary to say to Torquatus, “Things have gone far enough, now. This is where we should stop the killings.” And what if Torquatus disagreed?

Very likely the name of Valerian Apollinaris would be the next one added to the roster of the condemned, in that case. And, though Apollinaris had never been greatly concerned about his personal safety, he saw now that in the present situation he must preserve his life for the sake of the Empire. There was no other bulwark but him against the encroaching chaos.

Best to face the issue immediately, Apollinaris decided.

He went to see Torquatus.

“The Senate is growing very uneasy,” he said. “These four executions—”

“They were traitors,” Torquatus said sharply. Sweat was rolling down his fleshy face in the dense, humid atmosphere of the room, but for some reason unfathomable to Apollinaris the man was wearing a heavy winter toga. “They wallowed in Demetrius’s iniquities to their own enormous profit.”

“No doubt they did. But we need the Senate’s continued support if we’re to carry through our program.”

“Do we? The Senate’s just an antiquarian vestige, something left over from the ancient Republic. Just as the Consuls were, before you and I revived the office. Emperors functioned perfectly well for at least a thousand years without sharing any power at all with the Senate or the Consuls. We can get along without the Senate, too. Who’s been talking to you? Lactantius Rufus? Julius Papinio? I know who the malcontents are. And I’ll take them down, one by one, until—”

“I beg you, Torquatus.” Apollinaris wondered whether he had ever uttered those words before in his life. “Show some moderation, man. What we’re trying to achieve is a very difficult thing. We can’t simply dispense with the backing of the Senate.”

“Of course we can. The axe awaits anyone who stands in our way, and they all know it. What was Caligula’s famous line? ‘Oh, that these annoying Romans had only a single neck’—something like that. That’s how I feel about the Senate.”

“Caligula is not, I think, the philosopher you ought to be quoting just now,” said Apollinaris. “I urge you again, Torquatus, let us be more moderate from here on. Otherwise, what I fear is that you and I are lighting a fire in Roma that may prove to be extremely difficult to put out, a fire that may easily consume you and me as well before it’s over.”

“I’m not convinced that moderation is what we need at this point,” said Torquatus. “And if you fear for your life, my friend, you have the option of resigning your Consulship.” His gaze now was cold and uncompromising. “I know that you’ve often spoken of returning to private life, your studies, your country estate. Perhaps the time has come for you to do just that.”

Apollinaris summoned the most pleasant smile he could find. “Not just yet, I think. Despite the objections I’ve just put to you, I still share your belief that there’s much work for us to do in Roma, and I intend to stand with you while it’s being carried out. You and I are colleagues in this to the end, Marcus Larcius. We may have disagreements along the way, but they’ll never be permitted to come between us in any serious way.”

“You mean that, do you, Apollinaris?”

“Of course I do.”

A look of enormous relief appeared on Torquatus’s heavy-featured, deeply furrowed face. “I embrace you, colleague!”

“And I you,” said Apollinaris, standing and offering his hand to the bigger man, but making no move to let the talk of embraces be anything more than metaphorical.

He returned quickly to his headquarters on the floor below and called Tiberius Charax to him.

“Take ten armed men—no, a dozen,” he told the aide-de-camp, “and get yourself upstairs to Marcus Larcius’s office. Tell his bodyguards, if you encounter any, that you’re there at my orders, that a matter concerning the Consul Torquatus’s security has come up and I have instructed you to place these men at the Consul’s disposal at once. I doubt that they’ll try to stop you. If they do, kill them. Then grab Torquatus, tell him that he’s under arrest on a charge of high treason, bundle him out of the building as fast as you can, and place him under tight guard in the Capitoline dungeons, where no one is to be allowed to see him or send messages to him.”

It was to Charax’s great credit, Apollinaris thought, that not the slightest evidence of surprise could be detected on his face.

The problem now was choosing a new co-Consul, who would aid him in the continuing work of reconstruction and reform without in any way presenting serious opposition to his programs. Apollinaris was adamant in his desire not to rule by sole command. He lacked the temperament of an Emperor and he disliked the idea of trying to reign dictatorially, as a kind of modern-day Sulla. Even after twenty centuries the memory of Sulla was not beloved by Romans. So a cooperative colleague was needed, quickly. There was no question in Apollinaris’s mind that the task that he and Torquatus had begun needed to be seen through to completion, and that at this moment it was very far from being complete.

He hoped it could be done without many more executions, though. Certainly Torquatus in his Old Roman rigor had allowed the process of purgation to go too far. The first spate had been sufficient to eliminate the worst of the ones Torquatus had referred to, rightly, as the caterpillars of the commonwealth. But then he had begun his cleansing of the Senate, and by now everyone of any consequence in the realm seemed to be denouncing everybody else. The prisons were filling up; the headsman’s arm was growing weary. Apollinaris meant to check the frantic pace of the killings, and eventually to halt them altogether.

He was pondering how he was going to reach that goal, three days after Torquatus had been taken into custody, when Lactantius Rufus came to him and said, “Well, Apollinaris, I hope your soul is at peace and your will is up to date. We are scheduled to be assassinated the day after tomorrow, you and I, and some fifty of the other Senators, and Torquatus also, and the Emperor too, for that matter. The whole regime swept away in one grand sweep, in other words.”

Apollinaris shot a look of bleak displeasure at the wily old Senator. “This is no time for jokes, Rufus.”

“So you see me as a comedian, do you? The joke will be on you, then. Here: look at these papers. The entire plot’s spelled out for you in them. It’s Julius Papinio’s work.”

Rufus handed a sheaf of documents across the desk. Apollinaris riffled hastily through them: lists of names, diagrammatic maps of the governmental buildings, a step-by-step outline of the planned sequence of events. It had occurred to Apollinaris that Rufus’s purpose in coming to him with these charges was simply to get rid of an annoyingly ambitious young rival, but no, no, this was all too thorough in its detail to be anything but authentic.

He considered what little he knew of this Papinio. A red-haired, red-faced man, old-line Senatorial family. Young, greedy, shifty-eyed, quick to take offense. Apollinaris had never seen much to admire in him.

Rufus said, “Papinio wants to restore the Republic. With himself as Consul, of course. I suspect he thinks he’s the reincarnation of Junius Lucius Brutus.”

Apollinaris smiled grimly. He knew the reference: a probably mythical figure out of the very distant past, the man who had expelled the last of the tyrannical kings who had ruled Roma in its earliest days. It was this Brutus, supposedly, who had founded the Republic and established the system of Consuls. Marcus Junius Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar, had claimed him as an ancestor.

“A new Brutus among us?” Apollinaris said. “No, I don’t think so. Not Papinio.” He glanced through the papers once more. “The day after tomorrow. Well, that gives us a little time.”

With Torquatus locked away, the task of dealing with this was entirely his. He ordered Papinio arrested and interrogated. The interrogation was swift and efficient: at the first touch of the torturer’s tongs Papinio provided a full confession, naming twelve co-conspirators. The trial was held that evening and the executions took place at dawn. So much for the new incarnation of Junius Lucius Brutus.

There were great ironies here, Apollinaris knew. He had put Torquatus away in the hope of halting the torrent of killings, and now he had ordered a whole new series of executions himself. But he knew he had had no choice. Papinio’s plot would surely have brought the whole Imperial system down if the man had managed to live another two days.

With that out of the way, he took up the matter of the increasing troubles in the slum districts. The rioters were breaking statues, looting shops. Troops had been sent in and hundreds of plebeians had been killed, yet each day brought new violence.

Apollinaris’s agents brought him pamphlets that the agitators in the Subura were passing out in the streets. Like the late Julius Papinio, these men were calling for the overthrow of the government and the restoration of the Republic of olden times.

The return of the Republic, Apollinaris thought, might actually not be such a bad thing. The Imperial system had produced some great rulers, yes, but it had also brought the Neros and Saturninuses and Demetriuses to the throne. Sometimes it seemed to him that Roma had endured this long despite most of its Emperors, rather than because of them. Reverting now to the way things had been in antiquity, the Senate choosing two highly qualified men to serve as Consuls, supreme magistrates ruling in consultation with the Senate, holding office not for life but only for brief terms that they would voluntarily relinquish when the time came—there was more than a little merit in that idea.

But what he feared was that if the monarchy were overthrown Roma would pass instantly through the stage of a republic to that of a democracy—the rule of the mob, is what that meant, giving the government over to the man who promised the greatest benefits to the least worthy segments of society, buying the support of the crowd by stripping the assets of the productive citizens. That was not to be tolerated: democracy in Roma would bring madness even worse than that of Demetrius. Something had to be done to prevent that. Apollinaris ordered his men to seek out and arrest the ringleaders of the Subura anarchy.

Meanwhile Torquatus himself, safely tucked away in the Imperial dungeons, lay under sentence of death. The Senate, with Lactantius Rufus presiding over the trial, had been quick to indict him and find him guilty. But Apollinaris had not been able to bring himself, thus far, to sign the death warrant. He knew that he would have to deal with it sooner or later, of course. Torquatus, once imprisoned, could never be freed, not if Apollinaris intended to remain alive himself. But still—actually to send the man to the block—

Apollinaris left the matter unresolved for the moment and returned to the issue of the new co-Consul.

He went through the list of Senators but found no one who might be acceptable. They were all tainted in one way or another by ambition, by corruption, by laziness, by foolishness, by any of a dozen sins and flaws. But then the name of Laureolus Caesar came to mind.

Of royal blood. Intelligent. Youthful. Presentable. A student of history, familiar with the errors of Roma’s turbulent past. And a man without enemies, because he had wisely kept himself far from the capital during the most deplorable years of Demetrius’s reign. They would work well together as Consular colleagues, Apollinaris was sure.

Apollinaris had sounded Laureolus out about the Consulship once already, back in Tarraco. But he had withdrawn the suggestion as soon as he had made it, realizing that the Emperor would probably see young Laureolus as a potential rival for the throne and reject the nomination. That problem was no longer a factor.

Well, then. Summon Laureolus from his country retreat, let him know that Torquatus had been removed from office, tell him that his duty as a Roman required him to accept the Consulship in Torquatus’s place. Yes. Yes.

But before Apollinaris could call Tiberius Charax in to dictate the message to him Charax came running into his office unbidden, flushed, wild-eyed. Apollinaris had never seen the little Greek so flustered-looking before.

“Sir—sir—”

“Easy, man! Catch your breath! What’s happened?”

“The—Emperor—” Charax could barely get the words out. He must have sprinted all the way across the Forum and up the eight flights of stairs. “Has bribed—his way—out of his confinement. Is—back in the palace. Is under—the protection—of the former Praetorian Prefect, Leo Severinus.” He paused to collect himself. “And has named a completely new set of governmental ministers. Many of whom are dead, but he doesn’t know that yet.”

Apollinaris muttered a curse. “What is he saying about the Consuls?”

“He has sent a letter to the Senate, sir. Commanding that yourself and Torquatus be dismissed.”

“Well, at least I’ve taken care of the second part of that for him already, eh, Charax?” Apollinaris gave the aide-de-camp a grim smile. This was a maddening development, but he had no time for anger now. Action, quick and decisive, was the only remedy. “Get me the same dozen men you used when you arrested Torquatus. And half a dozen more of the same quality. I want them assembled outside this building ten minutes from now. I’m going to have to pay a little visit to the Praetorians.—Oh, and send word to Prince Laureolus that I want him here in Roma as soon as he can get here. Tomorrow, at the latest. No: tonight.”

The headquarters of the Praetorian Guard had been located since the time of Tiberius in the eastern part of the city. By now, nearly eighteen centuries later, the Praetorians, the Emperor’s elite personal military force, had come to occupy a huge forbidding block there, a dark, ugly building that was meant to frighten, and did. Apollinaris understood the risks he was running by presenting himself at that menacing garrison. The little squad of armed men accompanying him had purely a symbolic value: if the Praetorians chose to attack, there would be no withstanding their much greater numbers. But there were no options here. If Demetrius had really regained control, Apollinaris was a dead man already, unless he succeeded in winning the Praetorians over.

Luck was with him, though. The mystique of the Consular emblem, the twelve bundles of birchwood rods with the axe-heads jutting through, opened the gates of the building for him. And both of the Praetorian Prefects were on the premises, the Emperor’s man Leo Severinus and the replacement whom Torquatus had appointed, Atilius Rullianus. That was a good stroke, finding them both. He had expected to find Rullianus; but Severinus was the key player at the moment, and it had been more likely that he would be at the palace.

They might have been stamped from the same mold: two big pockmarked men, greasy-skinned, hard-eyed. The Praetorians had certain expectations about what their commanders were supposed to be like, and it was good policy to see that those expectations were met, which almost always was the case.

Severinus, the former and present prefect, had served under Apollinaris as a young officer in the Sicilian campaign. Apollinaris was counting on the vestiges of Severinus’s loyalty to him to help him now.

And indeed Severinus looked bewildered, here in the presence not only of his rival for command of the Guard but also of his own onetime superior officer. He stood gaping. “What are you doing here?” Apollinaris asked him immediately. “Shouldn’t you be with your Emperor?”

“I—sir—that is—”

“We needed to confer,” Rullianus offered. “To work out which one of us is really in charge.”

“So you asked him to come, and he was madman enough to do it?” Apollinaris laughed harshly. “I think you’ve spent too much time around the Emperor, Severinus. The lunacy must be contagious.”

“In fact it was my idea to come,” said Severinus stolidly. “The situation—the two of us holding the same post, Rullianus and I—”

“Yes,” Apollinaris said. “One of you appointed by an Emperor who has lost his mind, and the other one appointed by a Consul who has lost his job.—You do know that Torquatus is in the dungeons, don’t you, Rullianus?”

“Of course, sir.” It was hardly more than a whisper.

“And you, Severinus. Surely you understand that the Emperor is insane.”

“It is very bad, yes. He was foaming at the mouth, sir, when I left him an hour ago. Nevertheless—His Majesty ordered me—”

“Give me no neverthelesses,” Apollinaris snapped. “Orders coming from a crazy man have no value. Demetrius is unfit to rule. His years on the throne have brought the Empire to the point of collapse, and you two are the men who can save it, if you act quickly and courageously.” They stood before him as though frozen, so profoundly awed they did not seem even to be breathing. “I have tasks for you both, which I want you to carry out this very morning. You will have the gratitude of the Empire as your reward. And also the gratitude of the new Emperor, and of his Consuls.” He transfixed them, each in his turn, with an implacable stare. “Do I make myself clear? The men who make Emperors reap great benefit from their deeds. This is your moment in history.”

They understood him. There was no doubt about that.

He gave them their instructions and returned to the Consular building to await results.

It would be a long and difficult day, Apollinaris knew. He barricaded himself within his office, with his little group of guardsmen stationed in front of his door, and passed the hours reading here and there in Lentulus Aufidius’s account of the reign of Titus Gallius, in the Histories of Sextus Asinius, in Antipater’s great work on the fall of Roma to the Byzantines, and other chronicles of troubled times. In particular he lingered over Sextus Asinius’s account of Cassius Chaerea, the colonel of the Guards who had slain the mad Emperor Caligula, even though it meant his own doom when Claudius followed his nephew Caligula to the throne. Cassius Chaerea had known what needed to be done, aware that it might cost him his life, and he had done it, and it had. Apollinaris read Asinius’s account of Chaerea twice through and gave it much thought.

Late afternoon brought a great crack of thunder and a flash of lightning that seemed to split the skies, and then torrential rainfall, the first rain the city had had in the many weeks of this ferociously hot summer. Apollinaris took it as an omen, a signal from the gods in whom he did not believe that the miasma of the hour was about to be swept away.

Rullianus was admitted to his presence only minutes afterward, drenched by the sudden downpour. The execution of the former Consul Marcus Larcius Torquatus, Rullianus reported, had been duly carried out, secretly, in the dungeons, as ordered. Virtually on his heels came Severinus, with the news that in accordance with Count Apollinaris’s instructions the late Emperor Demetrius had been smothered in his own pillows, the body weighted with rocks, thrown into the Tiber at the place where such things usually were done.

“You’ll return to your barracks immediately and say nothing about this to anyone,” Apollinaris told them both, and they gave him brisk, enthusiastic salutes and left.

To Charax he said, “Follow them and have them taken into custody. Here are the orders for their arrests.”

“Very good, sir. The prince Laureolus is outside, sir.”

“And still almost an hour before nightfall. He must have borrowed the wings of Mercurius to get here this fast!”

But the prince’s appearance showed not the least sign that he had hurried unduly to the capital. He looked as cool as ever, calm, self-possessed, an aristocrat to the core, his chilly blue eyes betraying no trace of concern at the disarray that was apparent all over the city.

“I regret to tell you,” Apollinaris began at once, in his most exaggeratedly solemn tone, “that this is a day of great sorrow for the Empire. His Majesty Demetrius Augustus is dead.”

“A terrible loss indeed,” said Laureolus, in that same tone of mock solemnity. But then—clearly his quick mind needed only a fraction of an instant to leap to the right conclusion—a look of something close to horror came into his eyes. “And his successor is to be—”

Apollinaris smiled. “Hail, Laureolus Caesar Augustus, Emperor of Roma!”

Laureolus held his hands up before his face. “No. No.”

“You must. You are the savior of the Empire.”

Only this morning—it seemed years ago—Apollinaris had thought to invite Laureolus to join him in the Consulship. But Demetrius’s unexpected brief escape from his confinement in the royal guest-house had ended all that. Apollinaris knew that he could make Charax Consul now, or Sulpicius Silanus, the thrifty Prefect of the Fiscus Publicus, or anyone else he pleased. It would not matter. The role that needed filling this day was that of Emperor. And, very quickly, Laureolus had seen that, too.

Color had come to his face. His eyes were bright with anger and shock.

“My quiet life of retirement, Apollinaris—my work as a scholar—”

“You can read and write just as well in the palace. The Imperial library, I assure you, is the finest in the world. Refusing is not an option. Would you have Roma tumble into anarchy? You are the only possible Emperor.”

“What about yourself?”

“I was bred to be a military man. An administrator. Not an Emperor.—No, there’s no one else but you, Caesar. No one.”

“Stop calling me ‘Caesar’!”

“I must. And you must. I’ll be beside you, your senior Consul. I had thought to retire also, you know, but that too will have to wait. Roma demands this of us. We have had madness upon madness in this city, first the madness of Demetrius, then the different sort of madness that Torquatus brought. And there are men in the Subura threatening yet another kind of madness. Now all that must end, and you and I are the only ones who can end it. So I say it once again: ‘Hail, Laureolus Caesar Augustus!’ We will present you to the Senate tomorrow, and the day after that to the people of the city.”

“Damn you, Apollinaris! Damn you!”

“For shame! What way is that, Caesar, to speak to the man who has placed you on the throne of the great Augustus?”

Lactantius Rufus himself, as the presiding magistrate of the Senate, presented the motion that awarded Laureolus the titles of Princeps, Imperator, Pontifex Maximus, Tribune of the People, and all the rest that went with being First Citizen, Emperor of Roma, and, as the Senators got quickly to their feet to shout their approval, lost no time in declaring that the vote was unanimous. The Count Valerian Apollinaris was confirmed immediately afterward as Consul once again, and the eighty-three-year-old Clarissimus Blossius, the eldest member of the Senate, won quick confirmation also as Apollinaris’s new colleague in the Consulship.

“And now,” said Apollinaris that night at the palace, “we must begin the task of restoring the tranquility of the realm.”

It was a good glib phrase, but converting it from rhetoric into reality posed a greater challenge than even Apollinaris had realized. Charax had built a network of agents who traversed the city day and night to detect unrest and subversion, and they reported, to a man, that the poison of democratic ideas had spread everywhere in the capital. The people, the plebeians, those without rank or property of any kind, had not been in any way distressed to see mass executions of Imperial courtiers in the plaza of Marcus Anastasius, nor did it trouble them when the Consuls were sending packs of Senators to the scaffold, nor when they learned of the virtually simultaneous deaths of the Consul Torquatus and the Emperor Demetrius. So far as they were concerned it would be just as well to arrest the entire class of men who were qualified to wear the toga of free-born citizenship, and their wives and children as well, and send them off for execution, and divide their property among the common folk for the welfare of all.

Apollinaris decreed the formation of a Council of Internal Security to investigate and control the spread of such dangerous ideas in the capital. He was its chairman. Charax and Lactantius Rufus were the only other members. When Laureolus protested being omitted from the group, Apollinaris named him to it also, but saw to it that its meetings always were held when the new Emperor was otherwise occupied. Many unpleasant things needed to be done just now, and Laureolus was, Apollinaris thought, too proper and civilized a cavalier to approve of some of the bloody tasks ahead.

So am I, Apollinaris thought, a proper and civilized cavalier, and yet these weeks past I have waded through rivers of blood for the sake of sparing our Empire from even greater calamity. And I have come too far now for turning back. I must go onward, on to the other shore.

The ringleader of the rioting in the Subura had now been identified: a certain Greek named Timoleon, a former slave. Charax brought Apollinaris a pamphlet in which Timoleon urged the elimination of the patrician class, the abolition of all the existing political structures of the Empire, and the establishment of what he called the Tribunal of the People: a governing body of a thousand men, twenty from each of the fifty districts of the capital city, chosen by popular vote of all residents. They would serve for two years and then would have to step down so that a new election could be held, and no one could hold membership in the Tribunal twice in the same decade. Men of the old Senatorial and knightly ranks would not be permitted to put themselves forth as candidates.

“Arrest this Timoleon and two or three dozen of his noisiest followers,” Apollinaris ordered. “Put them on trial and see to it that justice is swift.”

Shortly Charax returned with the news that Timoleon had disappeared into the endless caverns of the Underworld, the ancient city beneath the city, and was constantly moving about down there, keeping well ahead of the agents of the Council of Internal Security.

“Find him,” Apollinaris said.

“We could search for him in there for five hundred years and not succeed in finding him,” said Charax.

“Find him,” Apollinaris said again.

The days went by, and Timoleon continued to elude capture.

Other plebeian revolutionaries were not as clever, or as lucky, and arrested agitators were brought in by the cartload. The pace of executions, which had fallen off somewhat during the period of official mourning following the announcement of Emperor Demetrius’s death and the ceremonies accompanying Emperor Laureolus’s accession, now quickened again. Before long there were as many each day as there had been toward the end of Torquatus’s time; and then the daily toll came to surpass even that of Torquatus.

Apollinaris had never been one to indulge in self-deception. He had removed Torquatus in the interests of peace, and here he was following the same bloody path as his late colleague. But he saw no alternative. There was necessity here. The commonwealth had become a fragile one. A hundred years of foolish Emperors had undermined its foundations, and now they had to be rebuilt. And since it appeared unavoidable that blood must be mixed into the mortar, so shall it be, Apollinaris thought. So shall it be. It was his duty, painful though it sometimes was. He had always understood that word, “duty,” as meaning nothing more complicated than “service”: service to the Empire, to the Emperor, to the citizens of Roma, to his own sense of his obligations as a Roman. But he had discovered in these apocalyptic days that it was more complex than that, that it entailed a heavy weight of difficulty, conflict, pain, and necessity.

Even so, he would not shirk it.

During this time the Emperor Laureolus was rarely seen in public. Apollinaris had suggested to him that it would be best, in this transitional period, if he let himself be perceived as a remote figure sequestered in the palace, floating high above the carnage, so that when the time of troubles finally ended he would not seem unduly stained with the blood of his people. Laureolus seemed willing to follow this advice. He kept to himself, attending no Senate sessions, taking part in none of the public rituals, issuing no statements. Several times a week Apollinaris visited him at the palace but those visits were Laureolus’s only direct contact with the machinery of the government.

Somehow he was aware, though, of the hectic activities in the plaza of execution.

“All this bloodshed troubles me, Apollinaris,” the Emperor said. It was the seventh week of his reign. The intolerable heat of summer had given way to the chill of an unnaturally cold and rainy autumn. “It’s a bad way to begin my reign. I’ll be thought of as a heartless monster, and how can a heartless monster expect to win the love of his people? I can’t be an effective Emperor if the people hate me.”

“In time, Caesar, they’ll be brought to understand that what is happening now is for the good of our whole society. They’ll give thanks to you for rescuing the Empire from degradation and ruin.”

“Can we not revive the old custom of sending our enemies into exile, Apollinaris? Can we not show a little clemency now and then?”

“Clemency will only be interpreted as weakness just now. And exiles return, more dangerous than ever. Through these deaths we guarantee the peace of future generations.”

The Emperor remained unconvinced. He reminded Apollinaris that the brunt of punishment now was falling on the common people, whose lives had always been hard even in the best of times. The contract that the Emperors had made with the people, said Laureolus, was to offer stability and peace in return for strict obedience to Imperial rule; but if the Emperor made the bonds too tight, the populace would begin turning toward the fantasy of a happier life in some imaginary existence beyond death. There had always been religious teachers in the East, in Syria, in Aegyptus, in Arabia, who had tried to instill such concepts in the people, and it had always been necessary to stamp such teachings out. A cult that promised salvation in the next world would inevitably weaken the common folk’s loyalty to the state in this one. But that loyalty had to be won, over and over again, through the benevolence of the rulers. Thus the need for judicious relaxation, from time to time, of governmental restraint. The present campaign of executing the people’s leaders, said Laureolus, flew in the face of wisdom.

“This man Timoleon, for example,” the Emperor said. “Must you make such a great thing of searching him out? You don’t seem to be able to find him, and you’re turning him into an even bigger popular hero than he already was.”

“Timoleon is the greatest danger the Empire has ever faced, Caesar. He is a spear aimed straight at the throne.”

“You are too melodramatic sometimes, Apollinaris. I urge you: let him go free. Show the world that we can tolerate even a Timoleon in our midst.”

“I think you fail to understand just how dangerous—”

“Dangerous? He’s just a ragged rabble-rouser. What I don’t want to do is make him into a martyr. We could capture him and crucify him, yes, but that would give the people a hero, and they would turn the world upside down in his name. Let him be.”

But Apollinaris saw only peril in that path, and the search for Timoleon went on. And in time Timoleon was betrayed by a greedy associate and arrested in one of the Underworld’s most remote and obscure caverns, along with dozens of his most intimate associates and several hundred other followers.

Apollinaris, on his own authority as head of the Council of Internal Security and without notifying the Emperor, ordered an immediate trial. There would be one more climactic spate of executions, he told himself, and then, he swore, the end of the time of blood would finally be at hand. With Timoleon and his people gone, Laureolus at last could step forth and offer the olive branch of clemency to the citizenry in general: the beginning of the time of reconciliation and repair that must follow any such epoch as they had all just lived through.

For the first time since his return to Roma from the provinces Apollinaris began to think that he was approaching the completion of his task, that he had brought the Empire safely through all its storms and could retire from public responsibility at long last.

And then Tiberius Charax came to him with the astonishing news that the Emperor Laureolus had ordered an amnesty for all political prisoners as an act of Imperial mercy, and that Timoleon and his friends would be released from the dungeons within the next two or three days.

“He’s lost his mind,” Apollinaris said. “Demetrius himself would not have been guilty of such insanity.” He reached for pen and paper. “Here—take these warrants of execution to the prison at once, before any releases can be carried out—”

“Sir—” said Charax quietly.

“What is it?” Apollinaris asked, not looking up.

“Sir, the Emperor has sent for you. He asks your attendance at the palace within the hour.”

“Yes,” he said. “Just as soon as I’ve finished signing these warrants.”

The moment Apollinaris entered the Emperor’s private study he understood that it was his own death warrant, and not Timoleon’s, that he had signed this afternoon. For there on Laureolus’s desk was the stack of papers that he had given Charax less than an hour before. Some minion of Laureolus’s must have intercepted them.

There was a coldness beyond that of ice in the Emperor’s pale blue eyes.

“Were you aware that we ordered clemency for these men, Consul?” Laureolus asked him.

“Shall I lie to you? No, Caesar, it’s very late for me to take up the practice of lying. I was aware of it. I felt it was a mistake, and countermanded it.”

“Countermanded your Emperor’s orders? That was very bold of you, Consul!”

“Yes. It was. Listen to me, Laureolus—”

“Caesar.”

“Caesar. Timoleon wants nothing less than the destruction of the Imperium, and the Senate, and everything else that makes up our Roman way of life. He must be put to death.”

“I’ve already told you: any fool of an Emperor can have his enemies put to death. He snaps his fingers and the thing is done. The Emperor who’s capable of showing mercy is the Emperor whom the people will love and obey.”

“I’ll take no responsibility for what happens, Caesar, if you insist on letting Timoleon go.”

“You will not be required to take responsibility for it,” said Laureolus evenly.

“I think I understand your meaning, Caesar.”

“I think you do, yes.”

“I fear for you, all the same, if you free that man. I fear for Roma.” For an instant all his iron self-control deserted him, and he cried, “Oh, Laureolus, Laureolus, how I regret that I chose you to be Emperor! How wrong I was!—Can’t you see that Timoleon has to die, for the good of us all? I demand his execution!”

“How strangely you address your Emperor,” said Laureolus, in a quiet voice altogether devoid of anger. “It is as if you can’t quite bring yourself to believe that I am Emperor. Well, Apollinaris, we are indeed your sovereign, and we refuse to accept what you speak of as your ‘demand.’ Furthermore: your resignation as Consul is accepted. You have overstepped your Consular authority, and there is no longer any room for you in our government as the new period of healing begins. We offer you exile in any place of your choice, so long as it’s far from here: Aegyptus, perhaps, or maybe the isle of Cyprus, or Pontus—”

“No.”

“Then suicide is your only other option. A fine old Roman way to die.”

“Not that either,” said Apollinaris. “If you want to be rid of me, Laureolus, have me taken to the plaza of Marcus Anastasius and chop my head off in front of all the people. Explain to them, if you will, why it was necessary to do that to someone who has served the Empire so long and so well. Blame all the recent bloodshed on me, perhaps. Everything, even the executions that Torquatus ordered. You’ll surely gain the people’s love that way, and I know how dearly you crave that love.”

Laureolus’s expression was utterly impassive. He clapped his hands and three men of the Guard entered.

“Conduct Count Apollinaris to the Imperial prison,” he said, and turned away.

Charax said, “He wouldn’t dare to execute you. It would start an entirely new cycle of killings.”

“Do you think so?” Apollinaris asked. They had given him the finest cell in the place, one usually reserved for prisoners of high birth, disgraced members of the royal family, younger brothers who had made attempts on the life of the Emperor, people like that. Its walls were hung with heavy purple draperies and its couches were of the finest make.

“I think so, yes. You are the most important man in the realm. Everyone knows what you achieved in the provinces. Everyone knows, also, that you saved us from Torquatus and that you put Laureolus on the throne. You should have been made Emperor yourself when Demetrius died. If he kills you the whole Senate will speak out against him, and the entire city will be outraged.”

“I doubt that very much,” said Apollinaris wearily. “Your view of things has rarely been so much in error. But no matter: did you bring the books?”

“Yes,” Charax said. He opened the heavy package he was carrying. “Lentulus Aufidius. Sextus Asinius. Suetonius. Ammianus Marcellinus. Julius Capitolinus, Livius, Thucydides, Tacitus. All the great historians.”

“Enough reading to last me through the night,” said Apollinaris. “Thank you. You can leave me now.”

“Sir—”

“You can leave me now,” said Apollinaris again. But as Charax walked toward the door he said, “One more thing, though. What about Timoleon?”

“He has gone free, sir.”

“I expected nothing else,” Apollinaris said.

Once Charax was gone he turned his attention to the books. He would start with Thucydides, he thought—that merciless account of the terrible war between Athens and Sparta, as grim a book as had ever been written—and would make his way, volume by volume, through all of later history. And if Laureolus let him live long enough to have read them all one last time, perhaps then he would begin writing his own here in prison, a memoir that he would try to keep from being too self-serving, even though it would be telling the story of how he had sacrificed his own life in order to preserve the Empire. But he doubted that Laureolus would let him live long enough to do any writing. There would be no public execution, no—Charax had been correct about that. He was too much of a hero in the public’s eyes to be sent off so callously to the block, and in any event Laureolus’s stated intention was to give the executioners a long respite from their somber task and allow the city to return to something approaching normal.

He reached for the first volume of Thucydides, and sat for a time reading and rereading its opening few sentences.

A knock at his door, then. He had been waiting for it.

“Come in,” he said. “I doubt that it’s locked.”

A tall, gaunt figure entered, a man wearing a hooded black cape that left his face exposed. He had cold close-set eyes, a taut fleshless face, rough skin, thin tight-clamped lips.

“I know you,” said Apollinaris calmly, though he had never seen the man in his life.

“Yes, I believe you do,” the other said, showing him the knife as he came toward him. “You know me very well. And I think you’ve been expecting me.”

“So I have,” said Apollinaris.

It was the first day of the new month, when the Prefect of the Fiscus Imperialis and the Prefect of the Fiscus Publicus traditionally lunched together to discuss matters that pertained to the workings of the two treasuries. Even now, many weeks along in the reign of the new Emperor, the Emperor’s private purse, the Fiscus Imperialis, was still under the charge of Quintus Cestius, and the other fund, the Fiscus Publicus, was, as it had been for years, administered by Sulpicius Silanus. They had weathered all the storms. They were men who knew the art of surviving.

“So Count Valerian Apollinaris has perished,” Cestius said. “A pity, that. He was a very great man.”

“Too great, I think, to be able to keep out of harm’s way indefinitely. Such men inevitably are brought down. A pity, I agree. He was a true Roman of the old sort. Men like that are very scarce in these dreadful times.”

“But at least peace is restored. The Empire is whole again, thanks be to Count Apollinaris, and to our beloved Emperor Laureolus.”

“Yes. But is it secure, though? Have any of the real problems been addressed?” Silanus, that sly little man of hearty appetite and exuberant spirit, cut himself another slab of meat and said, “I offer you a prediction, Cestius. It will all fall apart again within a hundred years.”

“You are too optimistic by half, at least,” said Quintus Cestius, reaching for the wine, though he rarely drank.

“Yes,” said Silanus. “Yes, I am.”